2.1 OFDI on green technology innovation
As an important resource acquisition channel, OFDI refers to the investment that made through direct establishment and operation of enterprises in foreign countries, including participating in capital, establishing joint ventures, buying existing enterprises and opening subsidiaries (or branches), which enables companies have access to the critical productive resources, such as advanced technology, management experience, research and development results, and cutting-edge information resources (Du et al., 2012; Huang, 2013; Feenstra et al., 2014; Bauer et al, 2016; Huang and Zhang, 2017; Wu et al, 2017; Hamida, 2017; Zhou et al., 2019). Green technology innovation is considered to have additional restrictions compared with the developing of general new technology, and thereby brings up more requirements on company's resource allocation, strategic deployment, and internal management model, which is likely to hurt their profitability. Therefore, given the increasing strict environmental regulations, OFDI will probably polish up enterprises’ green technology innovation capability through reverse technology spillover effect, investment income feedback effect, learning effect, and other approaches.
Specifically, reverse technology spillover effect is widely recognized as the knowledge spillover that enterprises seek outward advanced technology by embedding into the technological innovation network of the host country through the establishment of international subsidiaries, international joint ventures and foreign R&D centers, and is likely to enrich knowledge stock and improve the technological level of domestic enterprises in terms of the technology diffusion effect, imitation follow effect, talent flow effect and information platform effect (Pradhan and Singh, 2009;Du et al., 2012; Hamida,2017). The feedback effect of investment income refers to the income generated by enterprises’ investment in the overseas branches, and is able to benefit feedback to the R&D investment and innovation activities of parent companies(Yang et al., 2013; Li et al., 2016a; Piperopoulos et al., 2017). In detail, the parent company is able to bypass trade barriers and achieve large-scale economy, thereby reducing the unit cost and increasing sales revenue through OFDI. Meanwhile, as an effective approach to expand the market scale, OFDI is expected to share parent company's R&D expenditure pressure by remaining the investment income in their oversea branches. In addition, learning effect emphasize that OFDI is also an effective approach for enterprises to update their knowledge base, including advanced technical knowledge and management knowledge, through a wider range of international communication and cooperation, which involves continuous exchange and learning with overseas consumers, suppliers and scientific research institutions and consequently promote their new technology R&D capability by both learning-by-doing and learning-by-searching effect (DeLocker,2013; Bena and Li,2014; Ye et al., 2018; Yi et al.,2020).
Given the critical period of green transition of China’s enterprises as well as their relatively weak green-tech innovation capacity compared with developed countries (Piperopoulos et al., 2018; Bai et al., 2020), OFDI is expected to quickly enhance enterprises’ green-tech level and gain competitive advantage by seeking outward knowledge. Thus, hypothesis 1 is proposed as follow:
H1: OFDI has a positive effect on corporate green technology innovation. That is to say, the OFDI from the perspective of corporate green technology innovation will not induce the green escape effect.
2.2 Moderating role of Government subsidies
In general, the developing of new technology is basically characterized by relatively large-scale investment and high risk (Kang and Park, 2012; Catozzella and Vivarelli, 2016; Shang et al.,2021). More specifically, large-scale investment indicates that enterprise's R&D of new technology usually involves a large quantity of supportive resource, namely, a large amount of initial financial support and high-tech R&D personnel participation. High risk suggests that there are technical risks, competitive risks and objective environmental risks in the development of enterprises’ new technologies. Therefore, government subsidy is likely to stimulate the motivation of enterprises’ innovative activities by directly reducing the cost and risk in new technology R&D progress (Kang and Park, 2012; Cappelen et al., 2012; Huergo and Moreno, 2017; Bellucci et al., 2019). In particular, the positive effect of government subsidies will be more significant on the developing of green new technologies that characterized with higher public goods spillover (Peng and Liu, 2018; Wu and Hu, 2020). Thus, as an essential external supportive resources for enterprises' R&D activities, government subsidy is likely to cultivate enterprises’ green technology innovation motivation in terms of the direct and indirect approach (or moderate effect).
However, there is still no consensus on the specific role of government subsidy in enterprises’ technology innovation process. Recent efforts to explore the relation between government subsidies and technology innovation have gradually formed four main points, namely, positive effects, negative effect, non-linear relationship, heterogeneity of effect. As for the positive effects, government subsidy is recognized to be an effective approach to alleviate the financing pressure and R&D risks in new technology innovation process, enhancing the return on investment, and consequently improving the motivation of firms’ technology innovation (Bernini and Pellegrini, 2011; Cappelen et al., 2012; Bellucci et al., 2019; Guo et al., 2016; Huergo and Moreno, 2017). The negative side points out that government subsidies are likely to induce rent-seeking behavior of enterprises’ decision-makers and policy-makers due to the imperfection of subsidy distribution system and supervision mechanism, resulting in deviation from the original purpose of subsidy policy (Catozzella and Vivarelli, 2016; Boeing, 2016; Wang et al., 2017). The non-linear relationship viewpoint holds that government subsidy has a threshold effect as well as an effective range of support intensity (Mao and Xu ,2015;Yu et al.,2016). In terms of the heterogeneity of effect, the specific effect of government subsidies will change accordingly with the variations of situations (Howell, 2017).
Therefore, a positive U-shaped moderating role is likely to be played between OFDI and enterprise green technology innovation, suggesting that the increase of government subsidies will probably weaken the positive effect of OFDI on corporate green technology innovation when it fall below a certain threshold, while strengthen their positive relation when it climb above this threshold. This is possibly caused by the power of policy signal on specific supportive fields that effectively regulate enterprises’ green-tech innovative behaviors as well as the resources acquired from OFDI. Thus, hypothesis 2 is proposed as follow:
H2: The government subsidies has a positive U-shaped moderating effect in the positive relationship between OFDI and enterprises green technological innovation.
2.3 Moderating role of slack resources
Slack resources usually refers to the corporate excess available resources in a given time (Voss et al., 2008), and are expected to benefit the development of new technologies (Li and Gao, 2014), which is considered to be divided into unabsorbed slack resources and absorbed slack resources respectively (Sharfmam, 1988). Absorbed slack resources are characterized by poor liquidity and flexibility, and existing in the form of private costs, which is often arranged in specific projects but not easy to be reconfigured. Accordingly, enterprises are likely to be bloated within the organization, lower efficiency of resource allocation, less sensitive to environmental changes, and thereby damaging the progress of new development strategies and investment projects when the absorbed slack resource continuously growing (Huang and Li, 2012; Argiles-Bosch et al., 2016; Wu and Hu, 2020). Thus, it is easy to form an inverted U-shaped adjustment effect in the relationship between OFDI and corporate green technology innovation. In terms of a appropriate scale of absorbed slack resource, enterprises are likely to be adaptive to the variation of external context, and flexibly configured according to the OFDI project requirements as well (e.g. international capital participation, international joint ventures, international enterprises buyouts and overseas subsidiaries). While the relative higher or lower scale of absorbed slack resource are both unfavourable for positively moderate the relation between OFDI and enterprises’ green-tech innovation, for a higher scale will probably reduce the flexibility of resource allocation, and a lower scale will also lead to the problem of insufficient resources.
Unabsorbed slack resources refer to resources that are available and flexible to be allocated to any other projects with relative less constraints compare with the counterparts. Owing to the higher liquidity and stronger conversion capabilities, unabsorbed slack resources are often allocated in the company's new development strategy, such as new product research and development, new market expansion, and other context (Klingebiel and Rammer, 2014). Therefore, unabsorbed slack resources are likely to positively moderate the relation between OFDI and enterprises’ green technology innovation, that is, the more storage of unabsorbed slack resources (e.g. argiles Bosch et al., 2016 for financial resources), the more resources that enterprises can reconstruct and use for reconfiguration, and the more powerful support and guarantee can be provided for OFDI, so as to strengthen the role of green new technology research and development of enterprises. Thus, the hypothesis 3 is proposed as follow:
H3a: The absorbed slack resources have an inverted U-shaped moderating effect in the positive relationship between OFDI and corporate green technology innovation.
H3b: Unabsorbed slack resources will strengthen the positive effect of OFDI on corporate green technology innovation.